Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • May 18, 2011 cett’s men more food than they could eat, and told them which tribes farther up they would have to beware of. Fawcett’s ability to get along with the Amazon Indians, based on kindness and respect, was second only to his amazing toughness. The region where Fawcett expected to find the Lost City of Z, the Mato Grosso, was in his era a huge jungle full of creeper vines, giant trees, vampire bats, poisonous snakes, electric eels, jaguars, and Indians who had a right not to trust unknown whites. Progress was measured in single miles per day as Fawcett, his son, Rimell, and two or three friendly Indians used machetes to hack trails for their pack horses. “Secrets of the Dead” covered the same ground. The terrain that had been jungle and swamp in Fawcett’s day had turned into grassland and semi-desert. What had once looked like Tarzan Country in Johnny Weissmuller movies now looked like part of Kansas or the eastern Dakotas, or the rural parts of California once the Spaniards and AngloSaxon Gold Rush-era settlers cut down all the oak trees the Indians once harvested for acorns. This Mato Grosso, readers, used to be the area where it took the Fawcetts and Rimell a day to hack two miles through the undergrowth – and where the trees recycled an ambient humidity into daily rainstorms, hence the name “rain forest.” It is gone. Unless it grows back, the planet could eventually run out of adequate oxygen to sustain intelligent life, which would mean that PBS and WQXR would both go out of business. No one knows what happened to Fawcett. According to legend, he was adopted first as a slave and then as a king by mysterious tribe members who had never seen a white man, while Jack became the next king of the Lost City of Z: a future “Secrets of the Dead” reported that Fawcett saw in his dreams, which explains why he dragged an inexperienced youngster like Jack and his inseparable friend on an expedition. David Grann, who left Brooklyn to cover a large part of the Fawcett journey, thinks Fawcett may have been killed by Indians or possibly died of exhaustion, though he wisely provides no specific scenario and points out that skeletal remains said to have been Fawcett’s turned out to be the vestiges of a tall Indian who, unlike Fawcett, didn’t wear dentures and didn’t need them. “Secrets of the Dead” surmises that Fawcett was murdered, not by Indians, but by renegade Brazilian soldiers who wanted to steal his guns and equipment. Fawcett’s authenticated signet ring and a sextant both turned up in pawnshops not generally frequented by Amazon warriors. I would go with that explanation because it makes the most sense. Advocates of the survival theory sometimes came up with “white Indians” who proved to be genetic albinos whose anthropological measurements – in the latest cases, their DNA -- showed they were full-blooded Indians lacking skin pigment. None of the “white Indians” was a plausible heir to Percy and Jack Fawcett. There actually were two “Lost Cities of Z.” What the Spanish man saw in the 1700s turned out to be rock formations that looked like man-made columns and pillars from a distance. Apparently, there were suspicious Indians roaming around them, and he never got close enough to see that the “columns” were geological and not man-made. Farther south, the buried remnants of an Indian “city” that could have sheltered several thousand people also turned up, but the houses would have been made of earth and grass, not stone. Split the difference, and you have one Lost City of Z. We may never know what happened to the Fawcetts and Rimell, but we know what is going to happen to use if the rest of Amazonia and the remaining rain forests of sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia go the way of the Mato Grosso, which was still impenetrable jungle when I was kid reading comic books. We are all going to choke if we don’t drown. The good news is that we can save it by going absolutely nothing. Quit cutting down trees. Tell the contractors they will just have to build around them. Quit granting variances to expand houses outward. If people need to add a story upward so grandma can move in, that is a human consideration and should be honored. Above all, terminate the lawn fetish. Let whatever pops up grow up, unless it’s allergenic or hallucinogenic. If you’re ambitious and energetic, replace that turf with pachysandra, ivy, ferns, ornamental grasses, or anything else that doesn’t need mowing and fertilizing. Set aside a grassy croquet or badminton court and used the rest of the land to grow native trees and shrubs. The Brazilian government eventually stopped slaughtering the Indians – notably after stolen rubber trees transplanted in tropical Asia produced organized plantations – but they don’t seem to be able to stop desperate settlers from chopping down trees to raise cattle. There was a song on the radio when I was a kid -- “They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil” – but based on what I saw of the search for the Fawcetts, they haven’t got an awful lot of trees left. We had better start cutting the slack right here in Bergen County. Don’t touch that lawn mower. The life you save could be your grandchild’s. Recently, I enjoyed a video tour of the Amazon Basin. “Secrets of the Dead,” a PBS show, took me on a search for the fate of Percy Fawcett, the man who was the inspiration for Indiana Jones and whose 1925 disappearance with his son and his son’s best friend inspired relief expeditions that may have cost a hundred lives. Fawcett was searching for The Lost City of Z (pronounced “zed” by Englishmen), which had been discussed since the 1500s. The city was reportedly seen from a distance by a fevered Spanish explorer in the 1700s and was rumored by some to be El Dorado, a place where the Indians had so much gold that they oiled themselves, rubbed the gold onto their skins, glittered for a few hours, and then took a swim and left the gold dust in the bottom of the lake in the middle of the city. Sir Walter Raleigh lost his son and his best friend on an expedition to find El Dorado in a somewhat different quadrant of the Amazon Basin, and the failure of that expedition played a role in costing Sir Walter his head. The stakes were high, and the fact that Fawcett took a young man named “Raleigh” with him on the 1925 expedition would have ruled out any participation by superstitious adventurers. Fawcett was a late-Victorian eccentric. He was a former British colonial officer in Ceylon, where he “discovered” some impressive ruins; a spiritualist who, during front-line service in Flanders in World War I, reportedly consulted a Ouija board to direct his artillery fire; and a vegetarian and teetotaler at home who sometimes ate meat and drank whiskey (and took opium) on tropical expeditions so he could sleep off bouts of fatigue strong enough to cause physical pain and insomnia. But Fawcett was so tough that most people who traveled with him didn’t do it again because they couldn’t keep up with him. He was 58 when he took off for the 1925 expedition, and his son Jack and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell, trained athletes, weight lifters, and avid joggers in their mid-20s, wore out. The Amazon Basin in the years of Fawcett’s early expeditions had been the Belgian Congo of the Western Hemisphere. Indians who had never seen a white man before were beguiled and befuddled with whiskey and then pressed into slavery to gather wild rubber: “black gold,” which had become vital with the new industrial processes of electrical generation and water-proofing. Sir Roger Casement reported that, in one district alone, 30,000 Indians had been murdered because they didn’t work hard enough. The Indians began to retaliate. When 80 prospectors took a detour, their colleagues found them buried waist-deep in an anthill full of fire ants. Fawcett had a tactic for dealing with the Indians: He treated them as humans. Once, when a six-foot poisoned arrow smacked through the bulwark of his dugout canoe, he told his men not to shoot and whipped out an accordion. The Indians were so curious to see how the accordion made those strange sounds that they stopped shooting. Fawcett’s men held up their hands, and the Indians crowded around Fawcett and his accordion. The Indians smiled and danced. They accepted gifts of steel knives and beads, gave Faw- The Lost City of Z could be our very own Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: The Franklin Lakes Environmental Commission would like to thank the more than 50 volunteers who participated in the cleanup of the Franklin Lakes Nature Preserve on Saturday, May 7. The enthusiastic volunteers brought out 127 bags of debris, 14 old tires, a rusted water heater, a car fender, and bundles of plastic lawn edging. A crew from the borough DPW, under the direction of Supervisor Brian Peterson, was on hand to haul away the waste. The DPW has been working over the winter to establish walking trails, design a parking area, and return this beautiful area to its natural state for the public to enjoy. We would also like to thank Mayor Frank Bivona and members of the Franklin Lakes Council for their participation, the Franklin Lakes Police Department for monitoring Commission appreciates volunteers the traffic to keep the volunteers safe, and for the welcome contribution of refreshments from the Franklin Lakes PBA Local #150. Carol Holden Franklin Lakes Environmental Commission Dear Editor: A letter writer recently claimed the March 2 Villadom TIMES report on the approval of a Millbrook Estates house on Birch Road house was inaccurate. The size of the proposed house was stated correctly in the report, but it was the footprint of the house, although not identified as such, and the letter writer apparently believes the total square footage of the house should have been reported. That number, however, was not available. Frank J. McMahon Reporter responds